As the Online News Association annual conference unfolded last weekend, my coworkers and I were eagerly watching and griping at the same time. It would have been awesome to be there.
As tightly scheduled, financially struggling journalists, these big industry conferences seem more and more out of reach to attend but they also offer the greatest payoff in an industry where networking and skill sharpening is nearly the only way to stay afloat.
Lori Todd and I coauthored a blog post about how the expensive cost associated with these beneficial industry events ends up hurting several areas of our business in the long run, in ways that industry leaders may or may not realize. A tidbit:
Expensive conferences put out-of-work journalists at an even greater disadvantage. Attending industry events and keeping skill sets up-to-date are all we can rely on to market ourselves in a suddenly flooded field of applicants. Attending a conference is resume material. Following a conference online is not.
The rest of the post is over at Lori Todd’s blog. We’d love to hear feedback on other ways or ideas to establish more affordable training and networking opportunities that don’t necessarily involve staying connected through social media. Another 10,000 Words post from Mark Luckie stresses the importance of real-life relationships. I couldn’t agree more, I just wish they were more affordable.
Find us on Twitter: @malcolli, @loritodd. Let’s strike up a conversation.
You already know me. Lori Todd graduated in 2006 from the University of Miami and has worked at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Austin American-Statesman before returning to the Miami Herald as a news page designer in September 2008.
We know it’s been about two months since our first #HeraldTweetup (which totally rocked because of all of you lovely people) and South Florida is getting antsy. In case you haven’t heard, we’ve set a date, so you should save it! Set a reminder alert on your cell phone and RSVP on our twtvite for Thursday, Sept. 10 at 6 p.m. at Crazy Pianos (@CrazyPianosMIA) in Coconut Grove. The Miami Herald staff of reporters, bloggers, designers, editors, producers and tweeters are looking forward to happy hour with our followers on Twitter.
We ask that you RSVP so we can get an estimate of how many people to expect. We will be announcing some very exciting events that the Herald is planning and there will be plenty of people on hand to demo our new Dolphins ’09 iPhone app if you want to check it out (come find me or @loritodd and we’ll show it off). Hope to see you there!
All I can really say is “Wow.” When the idea to host a tweetup had been thrown around months ago between @loritodd, @Heraldsports and I after I attended the @Sun Sentinel‘s first #SoFlaTweetup, we were slow getting started but once the ball started rolling it only took two weeks to see the RSVP list on our twtvite explode.
We were slightly nervous about the attendance, hoping the casual nature of tweetups didn’t result in too many last-minute “I’m-so-swamped, can’t-make-it” replies. But Miami, boy did you deliver. The Miami Herald staff was thrilled to have been able to socialize and meet you all face-to-face, the people behind the voices in our paper and online and the readers who’ve stuck with us through challenging times.
You blew us away by making #HeraldTweetup such a fantastic success.
Most of the other tweetups (RefreshMiami, BarCampMiami) and meetups I’ve attended in Miami have been tech-based, chock-full of geeks and developers, iPhone geniuses and Web designers. The community is flourishing and it’s exciting that the barriers to hang and mingle with these sharp minds are few. After a while though for us media folks it feels a little over our heads. I’m a tech-groupie, but I can’t talk serious shop with the talented geeks in Miami.
We hope to continue to host tweetups in the future as a vehicle for community interaction, uniting readers from all professions and backgrounds, and hopefully with changes in venue more readers from the tri-county area.
From our estimates about 150 of you fine folk were kind enough to spend your Tuesday night with us at Tobacco Road. You braved the heat, mosquitoes and a standing-room-only setup and for that we cannot thank you enough.
Please, please, please let us know if you have suggestions for future venues or ideas on what we can do to make these continually fun for all of you. Check out The Miami Herald’s South Florida Twitter Directory for more fun peeps to follow and keep checking it regularly, as the list will always be getting new names.
If you have photos from the event, we’d love it if you added them to our Flickr pool (thanks @loritodd!) and keep your eyes peeled for an event video on its way. We’ll tweet it at you.
One of the biggest issues plaguing print journalism with the rise of the internet is the inability for a newspaper to encourage interactive reader discussion. This usually takes place online in story comment sections or community forums. In print, this kind of audience sound-off can only take place among the few letters that are selected to print in “letters to the Editor” section.
These days, readers are talking and discussing and ranting more than ever. Even according to the 10,000 Words blog (one of my favorites), the only section that appeared twice in their post about the six Newspaper sections rendered obsolete by the web, was the Opinions section, which they say both isn’t going anywhere (“Even at their most basic form, newspapers will always contain someone’s opinion, albeit with a lot more fact-checking.”), but also serves less purpose because of comment sections.
Digging to the Opinion section means flipping through chunks of other sections to find a jumble of editorials from columnists and cartoonists and selected letters to the editor, all on different topics thrown together for the sake of keeping bias separate from fact. The story on 1A, for example, about South Florida housing becoming more affordable may or may not have a letter or opinion piece to accompany it over in the Op/Ed section, but readers are forced to go and scope it out, with or without a teaser from the story.
What if the Op/Ed section was dispersed throughout the entire paper? Each section — Nation, World, Local, Living, etc. — could have three or four pages in the back dedicated to letters and columns about the current events and issues in that section. I know some papers already do this in some form. The Miami Herald has certain columnists that are published on 1A and 1B on a weekly basis. These are usually the pieces that get readers stirring online the most as well. Comment sections for online versions of columns usually fill up pretty quickly. Some examples: Myriam Marquez, 33 comments and Linda Robertson, 148 comments .
In certain scenarios (like yesterday’s news of A-Rod’s positive steroid test), we had our column up online before it ran in print the next day. If we scooped some of the better-quality comments that were posted online and ran them beneath the story as “What others are saying,” print readers would get a taste of the buzz happening on our site. Online readers would also be compelled to write more thoughtful comments on the Web with the opportunity to get some play in print. This isn’t something that hasn’t been said before, but a stronger effort should be made to link print and the Web. Promos on the bottom of stories to “go online for a photo gallery” don’t paint a good picture of the conversation taking place about that story.
If we encourage more reader contribution to the print product, “citizen journalism” to use a cliche, it would allow more readers to talk to each other in addition to reading the static opinions of a few returning columnists.
As a more online-centric person when it comes to news, I know the argument could be made that this already occurs online in the ways that I’ve stated, so why duplicate it in print? But I think that goes against the nature of starting a conversation.
We have painted this picture of the prestige of becoming a journalist. That somehow after a few years of J-school we are granted the exclusive ability to feed information to people. In the online world, information is shared. You are not being talked AT, but rather talked to, listened to and open to a world of infinite conversation. Print newspapers should do a better job of emulating that.
I don’t want to sound naive. I fully understand the dire state of newspapers and as an online producer it is easier for me to envision a future of paperless news. But before we hammer the last nail into the coffin, what do newspapers have to lose when trying new things? It’s now or never to take some risks with the print product. I’d love any links to examples/blogs of papers who are doing this already (I doubt this is a novel idea).
We’ve been prepping for the event all this week and will be continually adding new content to the homepage of MiamiHerald.com through the big dance on Tuesday. We will be staffed with five producers all assigned to different tasks to keep new info coming cleanly and smoothly. I’ll personally be tweeting from my own account (@malcolli) and you can catch all headlines from @MiamiHerald. Stephanie Rosenblatt (@steph_rose) is building a graphic to contain all the good content from our inauguration page, similar to what she helped build for our ‘Cuba: 50 Years’ special report.
For now I’m assigned to attach links to new stories and moderate the comments sections, which I’m most excited about. Being a “community moderator” is a role that pops up more and more on the job boards so I’m intrigued as to what monitoring comments will actually entail in real time. I wasn’t lucky enough to be on staff during election night, which from what I’ve heard, was a newsroom party until five in the morning, but I don’t mind settling for this. We’ve also been on the watch for a certain former Cuban dictator to pass away after back-and-fourth reports of his continuing failing health issues. In South Florida, that’s about as big as the news can get.
If I was back in school, the upcoming week would be like midterms, only nothing to study. But I’ll learn a lot, no doubt.